Her (2013)
Directed by Spike Jonze
In the not so distant future, Theodore, a lonely writer, purchases a newly developed operating system designed to meet the user's every need. To Theodore's surprise, a romantic relationship develops between him and his operating system. This unconventional love story blends science fiction and romance in a sweet tale that explores the nature of love and the ways that technology isolates and connects us all.
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45 films that influenced Her
What critics say influenced Her
This is hardly a new concept for film, going back at least as far as the sexually suggestive and oddly alluring female robot of Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent classic.
In science fiction, we’ve seen similar themes in movies like “Metropolis” (1927) and “Electric Dreams” (1984).
There have been movies before about emotional relationships between humans and artificial beings, from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" to Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner."
Watching Her I thought a little of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Andrew Stanton’s Wall-E and the idea of love and machines.
Indeed, in Jonze’s radical retelling of the “Pinocchio” story (by way of 1984’s techno-romance “Electric Dreams,”), Samantha’s great existential crisis isn’t that she yearns to be a real, flesh-and-blood human.
In science fiction, we’ve seen similar themes in movies like “Metropolis” (1927) and “Electric Dreams” (1984).
If you immediately think of that obscure 1984 movie called Electric Dreams (or get visions of Philip J. Fry smooching a virtual Lucy Liu), then you’re the sort of sci-fi geek I respect — but let’s get all ideas of novelty and “gimmickry” out of the way right now.
It brings to full bloom what was only hinted at in the polite exchanges between the astronaut and HAL, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and, toward the end, as Samantha joins forces with like minds in cyberspace, it offers a seductive, nonviolent answer to Skynet, the system in the “Terminator” films that attacked its mortal masters.
Johansson’s face is never seen, Samantha being represented only by a girlish signature and a camera eye that recalls HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Her can, thus, be viewed as a benign variation on 2001: A Space Odyssey .
Like 2001: A Space Odyssey ’s first menacing, then pitiable HAL 9000, Samantha also emerges over the course of the film as a complex character, thanks in large part to Scarlett Johansson’s scratchy, velvety, irreducibly human-sounding voice.
Hollywood’s exploration of man’s relationship with computers, from HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Terminator , has mostly revolved around their destruction of us.
Possessing all the finest qualities of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Kelly LeBrock in Weird Science , “Samantha,” an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson in Spike Jonze’s Her , is a fully customizable virtual mate—with the privacy settings defaulting to “off.”
Charlie Kaufman will always have the honor of penning my favorite love story of all-time “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” but Spike Jonze and “Her” are giving it a true run for the money at the moment.
I suppose if he’d wanted, Jonze could’ve come up with a film about technology that replaces that sadness or extracts it, some kind of 22nd-century version of what Kaufman and Michel Gondry dreamed up for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind —of which Her is a clear descendant—Jonze’s film uses the tools of lightly scienced fiction to pose questions of genuine emotional and philosophical weight.
Her shares a lot of themes with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, another story about the difficulty of moving on from relationships that once seemed destined to last forever, and Phoenix, in a restrained performance radically different from his volcanic turn in The Master, conveys Theodore’s inner loneliness and yearning with a remarkable subtlety.
In terms of ethereal tone, offbeat romanticism and evanescent stylistic flourishes, the film that bears some comparison to Her is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which dealt with the search for love, its memory or its prospect, in a similarly fleeting, lightly heartbreaking manner.
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Phoenix also gets the rare-for-him chance to play comedy; his Theodore is a hardworking, lonely, but doggedly optimistic schlemiel who sometimes recalls Jack Lemmon’s C.C. Baxter in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment .
Jack Lemmon in The Apartment is the modern prototype: A functionary in an insurance company, he loses himself each night in old movies on television, while eating a TV dinner.
The visual sheen owes much to cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema ("Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy"), who lights scenes with a bright, polished look that echoes the utopian ideals of so many computer advertisements without overstating their cheap bids at lyricism.
Still, Her pushes some interesting notions and sports some lovely dialogue (I especially liked Theodore's speech about how all future feelings will just be smaller versions of ones he already experienced), and there are some stellar shots that further illuminate the versatility of cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (whose work here scarcely brings to mind his d.p. duties on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or Let the Right One In).
This is all laid out with superb craft (the cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema takes the understated tones he applied to 2011's " Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy " and adds a dreamy creamy quality to them, so that even the smog layering the Shanghai skyline that sometimes stands in for Los Angeles here has a vaguely enchanted quality) and imagination.
This slightly futuristic enterprise is set in a slightly futuristic Los Angeles, evocatively photographed by Hoyte Van Hoytema ("Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy") and smartly constructed out of bits of the real Los Angeles and glimpses of Shanghai's new purpose-built Pudong district by the directors' longtime production designer K.K. Barrett.
Must you ask? Technically, everything is but a dream, including cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema (“Let The Right One In,” “Interstellar,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”), production design by K.K. Barrett (“Being John Malkovich,” “I Heart Huckabees,” “Marie Antoinette”), costume design by Casey Storm (most of Jonze’s work) and music (different melancholy) by Arcade Fire and Owen Pallett.
Affectionately snuggling up to Phoenix as he whispers the sweetness of words to “Samantha” or the sweetness of a new letter at work, Hoytema has quickly become one of my favorite DP’s, especially following “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and “Let the Right One In.” Arcade Fire and Karen O. are simply magic in their music that accompanies our story about love.
(If Ryan Gosling could fall in love with a blow-up sex doll in “Lars and the Real Girl” and make us misty, you’ll believe Phoenix could fall in love with a computer voice.)
The story evinces such empathy for its characters and respect for their emotions that the film never threatens to become a gawking sideshow that makes a spectacle of redeeming its hero (I’m looking at you, “Lars and the Real Girl”), and the movie’s premise seldom overwhelms its plot.
Its defenders play down the science fiction element and focus on the human need for connection, forgetting that “Lars And The Real Girl” (2007) did just that and didn’t even need an actress to voice the dummy its protagonist fixated on.
But I don’t know… this kind of reminds me of Ryan Gosling in, you know, Lars and the Real Girl ?
But as we have seen in “Lars and the Real Girl,” “Ruby Sparks,” George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” (which became the musical “My Fair Lady’), there’s no happily ever after in a relationship with a creation.
Much like Lars and the Real Girl, Jonze avoids the queasier aspects of the relationship’s sexuality with some deft comedy and a few edits; this is a solo Jonze script, and many see similarities to it and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , penned by frequent Jonze-colaborator Charlie Kaufman.
The character’s constant vulnerability sometimes forces Phoenix towards an affected delivery that recalls Sean Penn’s oft-lampooned performance in “I Am Sam”, but Phoenix’s ability to ground Theodore in an almost pathological openheartedness ensures that he’s never more pathetic than he is relatable.
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Welcome to the very near future, as depicted in this strange, funny, slightly unsettling and utterly visionary film written and directed by Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich").
Previously responsible for the singular "Being John Malkovich " and "Adaptation" as well as the self-indulgent "Where the Wild Things Are," Jonze is a director who goes his own way with ideas no one else could have imagined.
Yet his films, which have included Being John Malkovich and Adaptation , almost always work because they take chances and don't underestimate the viewer's intelligence.
The visionary film from director Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich) explores the notion that increased reliance on technology in every aspect of our lives has made simple human interaction more difficult.
And coming from Jonze, the soulful eccentric who made Being John Malkovich , the movie is also an intimate departure, maybe even a personal one.
Photographed by Hoyte van Hoytema, designed by K.K. Barrett in a disarming marshmallow palette (inspired by the colors of Jamba Juice smoothie bars) and sonically shot through with the subliminal hum of a super-cushioned world, the film evokes the most convincing same-but-different future city since the sketchily glimpsed one in Soderbergh’s Solaris.